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Sunday, 5 August 2012

Paper Buildings in Town

Over the last few days I've been working on my scheme of work for Y6 for September. It will be their fourth year of Spanish and so I need to include plenty of new content and activities so as to keep things fresh and motivating.

We will be starting off with "Buildings in Town", followed by transport and directions and heading into "Then and Now". I've been looking at all my books to help me to complete the "Activites" and "Resources" columns of my plans.

Last week I bought these two books from Amazon:

Each has lots and lots of ideas for mini-book type projects and pop-up books. I was leafing through the Ages 4-7 one while watching Andy Murray annhiliate Roger Federer in the finals of the Olympic tennis this afternoon, and found one which I think will be very useful for demonstrating knowledge of opinions and regular verbs as well as buildings in town.

It's basically a zig-zag book, converted simply into a row of buildings. The photograph at the top shows "doors shut" and the second "doors open" to reveal the writing inside. Here's how to do it:

1. Fold a piece of A4 paper in half lengthways.

2. Fold it in half again, widthways.

3. Fold the top half over.

4. Turn it over and repeat to make a zigzag.

5. With the folded edge uppermost, snip the corners off to make the roof shapes.

6. Open it out and cut the doors in.

7. Fold the two halves back together. I glued them together before decorating. You are then ready to start decorating the buildings.

I'm sure there are lots of other ways that you could use this idea. If you use A3 paper, you get a much bigger space for writing, thus making it more suitable for KS3. I would recommend, as the book does, using stiff paper to make these with. I have used normal A4 photocopying paper, but once I had coloured my doors in they started to go a bit curly.

I am also thinking of having a go at making mini-maps, which are in the Age 7-12 book, and which I have had a go at folding. You can also find the instructions for the maps here.